How an Israel music festival turned into a nightmare after Hamas attack

For weeks, excited music-lovers had looked forward to the Supernova festival, held in the desert in southern Israel to coincide with the Jewish festival of Sukkot.

"The time has come when the whole family is about to get together again," organisers wrote on social media before it began. "And what fun it is going to be!"

Just hours later, their social media pages are now flooded with desperate people trying to find loved ones, after Palestinian militants stormed the festival and opened fire as part of huge surprise attack on Israel.

One partygoer, called Ortel, said the first sign that something was wrong was when a siren went off at around dawn, warning of rockets. Eyewitnesses said the rockets were quickly followed by gunshots.

"They turned off the electricity and suddenly out of nowhere they [militants] come inside with gunfire, opening fire in every direction," she told Israel's Channel 12.

"Fifty terrorists arrived in vans, dressed in military uniforms," she said.

People tried to flee the site, she said, running across the sand and getting into their cars to drive away - but partygoers said there were jeeps full of gunmen, shooting at the cars.

"They fired bursts, and we reached a point where everyone stopped their vehicles and started running. I went into a tree, a bush like this, and they just started spraying people. I saw masses of wounded people thrown around and I'm in a tree and trying to understand what's going on."

The festival site - with three stages, a camping area and bar and food area - was in the Negev desert, near Kibbutz Re-im. It is not far from the Gaza Strip, from where Hamas fighters crossed over at dawn to launch their attack. They infiltrated towns and villages, taking dozens of people hostage.

Festival-goer Adam Barel told Haaretz that everyone at the rave had been aware there was a chance of rocket fire in the area - but the gunfire was a shock.

Like many others, he tried to escape in his car - but there was a jeep with gunmen who began firing at them, so he got out and ran. "People were hit," he told Haaretz. "We hid. Everyone ran somewhere else."

"It was a battlefield," Omer, another partygoer, told Haaretz. He said people were jumping into any vehicle they could, but the road out of the festival site was strewn with burnt-out cars.

Esther Borochov told Reuters she was driving away when her vehicle was rammed into. She saw a young man driving another car, who told her to get in. She did - but the man was then shot at point blank. Esther said she played dead until she was finally rescued by Israeli military.

"I couldn't move my legs," she told Reuters from the hospital. "Soldiers came and took us away to the bushes."

Many festival-goers - like Ortel - hid in nearby bushes and fruit orchards for hours, hoping for the military to arrive and rescue them.

"I put the phone on mute mode, and then I started crawling through an orange grove," Ortel said. "Live fire was whistling above me."

Gili Yoskovich told the BBC how she hid in a pomelo orchard - a type of large citrus fruit. "They were going tree by tree and shooting. Everywhere. From two sides. I saw people were dying all around. I was very quiet. I didn't cry, I didn't do anything."

Eventually, after three hours, she heard some voices of Israeli soldiers, and decided to make a run to safety.

Another witness told Channel 12 it was "four-five hours of a horror movie".

"We ran like crazy, it was just crazy. There was a convoy of jeeps that started shooting from it."

The number of people killed and wounded at the festival is not yet clear. It is also not known whether Hamas took anyone hostage from the party, as they have done in other towns and villages.

But Yaniv, an emergency medic who was called out to the party, told public broadcaster Kan News: "There are at least 200 bodies of Israelis in the area I was in."

"It was a massacre," he said. "I've never seen anything like it in my life. It was a planned ambush. As people came out of the emergency exits, squads of terrorists were waiting for them there and just started picking them off. In the parking lots, people started running, murdering people inside the toilets.

"There were 3,000 people at the event, so they probably knew it. They had intelligence information."

For many friends and family members of people at the festival, they are now wracked with worry as they desperately hope to find missing loved-ones.

Among those missing is British man Jake Marlowe, 26, who was working as a security guard at the music event.

Mr Marlowe's mother Lisa, told the Jewish News: "He called me at 4.30am to say all these rockets were flying over. Then, at about 5.30am, he texted to say 'signal very bad, everything OK, will keep you updated I promise you', and that he loves me."

Moshe Or told Channel 12 that he has seen video on social media showing what appears to be his brother and his brother's girlfriend being taken captive.

"Their phones were unavailable and after a few hours an emergency team contacted us and said they had seen a video of them being kidnapped in the direction of the Strip.

"In the video, you see Noa [Argamani] scared, terrified, screaming in panic on a motorcycle... My brother, who is a big guy, two meters, is being held by five people."

The parents of 23-year-old American-Israeli Hersh Golberg-Polin are also looking for their son, who was the festival after celebrating his birthday.

According to the Jerusalem Post, on Saturday at 08:11, the parents received two short messages reading: "I love you" and "I'm sorry."

At least 500 Israelis have been killed since the attack began, according to the latest figures in local media.

Fighting between the Israeli military and Palestinian militants is continuing, and Israel has launched a wave of air strikes on Gaza. The strike have killed at least 313 people, Palestinian officials say.